Big Changes

America's century of being sole superpower is coming to an end shortly. This will mean a big change -- America lacking any influence whatsoever.

Since WWII America has been the lone super power, basically for the last century.

In the 1980s, the Cold War ended and everyone in the world realized that capitalism and some form of democracy was the only way to economic prosperity and communism was universally abandoned. Nations that were communist, or socialist or just not committed to capitalism all changed their minds – and started moving subsistence farmers into factories to make them workers, and grow their economy.

Because of this, global economists predict, there is going to be new superpowers with as much money as America, from countries that have populations as large as Americas and are converting to capitalism (Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South East Asia); what are generally known as “BRIC” countries.

Because of this - between 20 to 40 years from now, the entire world as we have known it since the Medi-Evil period is going to flip. For the last 200 years most of the wealth of the world (around 80%) was concentrated in Europe and America, and later Japan, countries known as “The West”.

Soon, though, the majority of the wealth of the world will be in the hands of the “non-western” world, and the wealthiest region in the entire world for the remaining century will not be any place in the West, but the region between and including India and China or “The East.”

20-40 years from now, America will no longer be the sole super power, but only 1 of 7 super powers. What happens when America is in a globally strategic position of not being the main superpower on the world stage, a situation it has not faced since before WW1, around a century ago.

Besides being dangerous on its own merit – the future is even more unstable for America because as America goes into a century of shifted economics within the next 20 years it is going in to future as effectively the most hated nation in the world.

Starting in 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq for a second time under President George W Bush, America’s global image was literally destroyed with America becoming the most hated country in the world. The problem is that this image problem has not improved at all in the last 10 years, even with the Presidency of Barak Obama. The situation is appearing to become permanent and not related to any particular President or policy, America itself is just seen as untrustworthy by key allies, Europe its closest ethnic relative, and most of the rest of the world’s nations according to PEW global surveys.

“Too many American leaders – both in government and corporate are gripped by denial, a type of Pollyanna group-think that insists that America will retain its greatness no matter what.”—Dr. James Canton “The Extreme future: the top trends that will reshape the World in the next 20 years”, 2006, pg 36.

“One of the problems with the United States over the last generation is that Americans haven’t felt there was much to learn from the rest of the world because America was so dominant and English a more or less universal language. The world has changed, but Americans haven’t yet caught up.”—Francis Fukuyama, “Democracy Still Rules. But Will US Catch Up in a Changing World?” Christian Science Monitor, June 8 2011.

“Thus it is that we can say that the capitalist world-economy has now entered its terminal crisis, a crisis that may last up to fifty years. The real question before us is what will happen during this crisis, this transition from the present world-system to some other king of historical system or systems.” —Immanuel Wallerstein “Globalization or the age of transition?: A long-term view of the trajectory of the world-system,” International Sociology, Volume: 15, Issue: 2, (2000) : 249-265